Are Celeb-Driven Kickstarters a Good Thing?

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Site co-founders and Zach Braff make a case for celebrity projects.

By Max Nicholson

Kickstarter has been getting a lot of attention lately following the success of big-name projects such as the Veronica Mars movie and Zach Braff's film Wish I Was Here. But in addition to record-breaking donations, these fundraisers have also been drawing a lot of criticism and a lot of questions: Should rich and famous people be using Kickstarter? Are they hurting smaller projects on the site? More importantly, is it fair?

In a recent post on Kickstarter, co-founders Yancey Strickler, Perry Chen and Charles Adler explained how celebrity-driven projects are a good thing -- not just for the site, but for everyone else using it.

"The Veronica Mars and Zach Braff projects have brought tens of thousands of new people to Kickstarter," the post read. "63 percent of those people had never backed a project before. Thousands of them have since gone on to back other projects, with more than $400,000 pledged to 2,200 projects so far. Nearly 40 percent of that has gone to other film projects."

Braff himself also responded to the criticism, noting that he wasn't out to steal any other project's thunder, merely promote his own wares. "Most of the backers of my film aren't people on Kickstarter who had $10 and were deciding where to give it, and then gave it to me instead of someone else," the actor said. "They came to Kickstarter because of me, because of this project. They wouldn't have been there otherwise.

"It's not like when you go to the home page there's a big picture of me smiling at you," he continued. "You have to click through past a lot of other worthy projects to find it... It's just sitting there in a corner of the site."